Bob Dylan Predicts Pretenders' Future

"Chrissie Hynde's a rock 'n' roll singer who really should go back and study some country music," Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone 20 years ago. "She should go deeply into the heart of that stuff and then come back out."

To listen to the Pretenders' new album, 'Break Up the Concrete,' which features marked amount of country flourishes -- namely, a prominent pedal steel guitar -- one would think Hynde's ears had been burning.

"I didn't know Bob Dylan was thinking about me twenty years ago," Hynde told Spinner during the Pretenders' recent Sessions taping. "Had I known, I might have done it earlier."

The sound is a shift for Hynde, whose early musical consumption was largely a diet of Iggy and the Stooges, not George Jones. "Being from Ohio in the '60s, it was kind of, like, not the thing," Hynde says of country music. "I was in to English bands and stuff. But then ... of course I loved Gram Parsons -- you know, more of the obvious stuff. Emmylou Harris. I never really got that country thing. I was in denial."

While Dylan may have called it two decades ago, Hynde credits another man with the musical venture. "Recently, I did a little thing with Jerry Lee Lewis where he came to the Civic Theatre in Akron, Ohio, to do a benefit by [philanthropist] Steve Bing, who I met through the PETA organization," she recalls. "It was Steve who planted the country seed. He said, 'Have you ever thought about doing a country album?' And of course I said no, but he did make me think about it."

We're still calling Dylan a prophet.

Watch Pretenders' Sessions